CSCO, VMW, HPQ On Point in Vegas; Arista Rising, Says Lazard

By Tiernan Ray

It’s a busy week in Las Vegas.

In addition to EMC‘s (EMC) user conference, EMC World, at the Venetian Hotel, there’s also the annual Interop networking conference, featuring 350 exhibitors and 10,000 attendees, by some estimates. The show will see a host of presentations from Cisco Systems (CSCO), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), VMware (VMW), Juniper Networks (JNPR), and others.

Brian White of Topeka Capital Markets, who is on the ground in Vegas, offered up his thoughts on what to expect. Notes White, the show should include a focus on “software-defined networking,” or SDN, cloud computing, “Big Data,” mobile devices, and solid-state storage.

White lays out the SDN moments to look for:

Cisco’s Senior VP & GM of the Enterprise Networking Group will kick off a series of keynotes at Interop this Wednesday with a focus on next generation networking architectures that includes SDN. The Cisco keynote will be followed by an SDN keynote panel that includes VMware’s Chief Architect of networking and three other companies. Also, Bob Muglia (Executive VP, Software Solutions Group) of Juniper will discuss the Company’s SDN vision. On Thursday, PayPal will discuss “the death of the password”, while an Enterprise Cloud Summit Keynote Panel will take place and HP’s Senior VP and GM of networking will discuss the changing landscape of networking [...] Last July, VMware announced its intention to purchase Nicera and the hype around SDN has since reached new heights [...] Last week, Hewlett-Packard announced a new SDN fabric for the cloud that is created on the HP FlexNetwork architecture and we expect this to be an important topic of discussion for the Company this week. This new fabric includes a host of new SDN data center products.

On the other hand, Lazard Capital Markets‘s Ryan Hutchinson , also on the ground there, sees privately backed Arista Networks causing waves for Cisco and others in data center switching:

Last week, Arista unveiled its 7500E switch which offers superior performance on virtually all metrics to competing solutions at a lower cost. Over the lastseveral years, Arista has shown impressive growth, and the 7500E release, which addresses multiple industry trends (cloud, virtualization, SDN), should allow continued momentum and customer traction. We believe Arista’s strengthening position in the DC switching market reaffirms our view that the company has the opportunity to create a duopoly similar to Cisco and Juniper in the core routing market. We see developments as negative for Cisco, Mellanox, Brocade, and Juniper. We are attending Arista’s analyst event at Interop where we expect to learn more.

About Tech Trader Daily

Tech Trader Daily is a blog on technology investing written by Barron’s veteran Tiernan Ray. The blog provides news, analysis and original reporting on events important to investors in software, hardware, the Internet, telecommunications and related fields. Comments and tips can be sent to: techtraderdaily@barrons.com.